Wanting to show the unnoticed part of my city, I entered a national writing contest. Behind the alleys of my parents’ restaurant, where many murals covered the walls of old houses, I took hundreds of pictures, thinking about a poem. What I was surprised by was that the path that I daily passed held an enormous amount of beauty. My mother suggested I write about the murals, and I settled on a single image, which is a painted sea meeting a painted sky. The poem was published, and the part that mattered most was not the book but the thought that others might now see what had always been there.